Arts and Letters

In spite of many linguistic theories, translation is normally possible and 99 percent of human beings have read the Bible in some language that was not Hebrew. But to be a great translator is another matter. Bill Weaver was a great translator, and to be great a translator, one must have the gift of living within a text, to have a continuous dialogue with its author (who frequently is no more there) and to be a great writer himself.

Modern Italian literature is known in the Anglo-Saxon world because of the tireless work of Bill, from Pirandello and Italo Svevo to Giorgio Bassani, Italo Calvino, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Leonardo Sciascia, and last, but first in terms of personal experience, myself.

My familiarity with Bill lasted 20 years, from the early eighties to the beginning of this millennium, and was interrupted only by the stroke that made him unable to work until his death. And I know how much his work was similar to the one of a goldsmith; working upon the text, he had to cope with chiselling each word and each sentence some times for days, first during an uninterrupted dialogue with the author, by mail or by personal conversations, and then with his editor (the insatiable Drenka Willen).

Translation studies tell us that a translation can be either source or target-oriented. In other words, given a translation from Homer, should the translation transform its readers into Greek readers of Homeric times or should it make Homer write as if he were writing today in our language? Should a translation lead the reader to understand the linguistic and cultural universe of the source text, or transform the original by adapting it to the reader's cultural and linguistic universe?

Translation studies speak also of the opposition between foreignising and domesticating a text. Should an English translation from a French novel speak of the Left Bank or of la rive gauche? Should one translate the French expression mon petit chou literally as my little cabbage (thus using a comic and insulting expression) or sweetheart, in this case missing the affectionate nuance and the sound of chou? Or should the translator keep the French expression?

The genius of William Weaver consisted in a supreme ability to keep a balance between these different options, and if we read his diaries concerning the translation of my Foucault’s Pendulum we see how much he tried to succeed in maintaining such a difficult equilibrium.

For instance one of his recurrent problems concerned verbal tenses: “When the narrator intervenes, Umberto uses regularly—or rather, irregularly—the pluperfect (“he had gone”) when in English, it seems to me, the past (“he went”) is more likely. As always in translating Italian narrative… the various layers of the past have to be rethought. Just as some of the future verbs have to be altered, usually to conditional.”

Thus, Weaver was obliged to reconsider the various temporal levels of my stories, especially when he was facing a character who remembers different temporal phases in a continuous interplay of embedded flashbacks.

There are cases in which Weaver, to make something evident to his target reader, had to change the text. Weaver cites chapter 107 of my Pendulum where, during a nightmare-like car trip through the mountains with his lover Lorenza, Belbo—passing through a lost village—runs over a dog. Nobody knows to whom the poor animal belongs and Belbo and Lorenza are obliged to waste the whole afternoon trying to assist the unfortunate beast, without really knowing what to do.

At a certain point, Belbo and Lorenza, having looked impotently at the moaning creature for more than an hour, my text says: “Uggiola, aveva detto Belbo, cruscante…”

Uggiola means whimpers but uggiolare is not such a common word in ordinary Italian. That is why I commented cruscante—which means that Belbo followed the classical prescriptions of the Crusca Dictionary, which for centuries represented and still represents the model for Italian language. Bill Weaver realised this point and in fact he comments: “Belbo says Uggiola, using an arcane, literary word. But in English "whimper" is not arcane at all. So to maintain the à toujours litteraire character of Belbo, I make him quote Eliot. “He’s whimpering. Belbo said, and then, with Eliotlike detachment: He’s ending with a whimper.”

Another interesting case concerns chapter 66 of Foucault’s Pendulum where—to make fun of the occultists and of their inclination to interpret any word, image, event, or thing of this world as a hermetic allusion to a Secret—Belbo shows Casaubon that it is possible to identify mystic symbols even in the structure of a car. Therefore, he interprets the axle of a car as an allusion to the Sephirotic Tree of the Kabbalah.

For the English translator the game was not so easy because in Italian we use the word albero, tree, both for the Kabbalistic symbol and for the axle of a car—while in English the verbal analogy disappears. Happily, consulting technical dictionaries, Weaver found out that even for cars it is technically possible to speak of an axle-tree. Thus, he could translate rather properly this sophomoric allusion. But he felt embarrassed when he met the line “Per questo i figli della Gnosi dicono che non bisogna fidarsi degli Ilici ma degli Pneumatici,” literally “For this reason the sons of Gnosis say that you have not to trust Hylics but rather Pneumatics.”

In English, this would sound senseless. In the Gnostic tradition, there is a distinction between Hylics and Pneumatics, that is, between material and spiritual people. By a happy coincidence in Italian pneumatici also means tyres (which is etymologically correct, since tyres are inflated with an aerial essence). However, in English the joke was untranslatable.

As Weaver says in his diary, while together having a sort of brainstorming about a possible solution, he mentioned a famous tyre brand, Firestone, and I reacted—by phonic association—with philosopher’s stone. At this point Weaver found the solution, and the line became, “They never saw the connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.”

Sometimes Weaver's solutions were dependent on curious discussions with my wife (who is German-born): “At one point in the novel Belbo says to Casaubon, in English: Good foryou. In his instructions to translators Umberto gives strict orders against the solution of a footnote reading “English in the original.” I suggested changing Belbo’s line to Bon pour vous. After a moment’s thought, Umberto said: “put Wunderbar.” I was not convinced—and I tell this to Renate, who says: “No, no. Put bon pour vous. No Italian publisher would have said Wunderbar in those days.”

An Italian critic said once that my novels are better in English than in Italian. Such a remark did not sound so friendly as far as my vanity was concerned, but I must loyally admit that Weaver, by remaining faithful to the texts he translated, made frequently imperceptible the fact that they were translations. They looked as original pieces of English literature.

Thus with the passing away of Bill I have lost a friend and a translator, but I think that both Italian and Anglo-Saxon culture have lost a great writer.

Bill was also a courageous pacifist. He was a conscious objector but at the same time he did not want to escape the tragedy of the Second World War. Thus, he joined the Red Cross and took part in the Italian campaign (in the front line), risking his life every day but avoiding to kill people.